The business of consulting

The digital darlings represent the school of creative disruption

In the last decade, the more far-seeing set of mature, large businesses has been making hopeful approaches towards design. Their ardour comes from seeing design as a source of competitive advantage, and has been reported on widely.

In this column, too, we labelled Apple, Airbnb, Google and their increasing tribe as “digital darlings”. In their wake, we noted, traditional behemoths like P&G and GE have made design more central, and made products, development and innovation (thus design) central to their resource allocations and hierarchy. Nowadays, these grey gentlemen are far less bashful in their approaches. The elevation of design seems like